Not a reference to our setbacks in the local elections, but to the state of the electricity supply in Broadfield.

On Thursday afternoon, at about 1:30pm, I was taking a break from the elections, resting my feet, having a drink and getting out of the sun at our local HQ (Colin & Laura's house) when we heard an almighty bang.  It sounded like an explosion, but we thought that was an unlikely thing to happen. And then there was a slightly smaller bang. And then two more.

At about this time Chrystal called Jayne to ask how to reset the circuit breakers in the house because the TV had gone off.  Jayne was trying to explain this, when Colin noticed that he had no electricity either, and we made the connection with the loud bangs. 

I set off to continue campaigning and when I got to the bottom of the road, where our sub-station is, there were a couple of fire engines and a couple of police cars. I got onto Tollgate Hill and there was another fire engine coming down, with lights are sirens going full-strength.

After talking to a few people around here we found out that power was out to more than just the small area served by the Hollingbourn Crescent  sub-station – there were places without power throughout quite an area of Sussex and also up as far as Salfords, even though most of the rest of Crawley was OK.

It seems that the sub-station blew up and the surge caused quite a few other sub-stations to trip.  The other sub-stations seem have been reset and worked OK after that, but our one was damaged and unusable.  There had been a fire there, which was put out reasonably easily – with an extinguisher I think. I guess the fire engines were a precaution, given that there is a gas facility a few feet away from the electric one.

The whole thing was personally annoying, and it did not help with the campaign either – people who had not yet voted really did not want to go out to the polling station in the evening. Not that there was much else to do, but being without electricity was looming a lot larger in everyone's mind than voting.

The problems came after 9pm, when it was getting dark. I had to have a cold shower by torchlight and then get dressed in the dark. I am often suspected of dressing in the dark, but thats just poor colour co-ordination: this time it was true!

Shortly after we arrived at K2 for the election count we heard that power had been restored by installing a diesel generator, so at least we had some juice when we got home. The telephone and Internet were playing up though, and I wondered if it was down to some equipment affected by the outage.

On Friday we were out all day until mid-afternoon, and shortly after we returned home the power went again.  It turned out that the generator which had been installed had not been powerful enough and had overloaded and packed up.  Eventually a new generator arrived, but the engineers could not get it working. They suspected it may be because it was not level.

So we had another evening of candlelight and making tea by boiling water in a saucepan – a luxury not available to any neighbours with electric cookers.

At about 11pm we wandered down the hill to see how the engineers were doing. There was still a small crowd of onlookers but not a lot of optimism from the engineers. They were talking about the possibility of not being able to get power restored until Monday.

This did not go down well.  We went back up the hill, in the darkness, and were pleasantly surprised when lights came on some time after midnight.

So far (touch wood) the power has stayed on, but we are acutely aware that it is all coming from a temporary generator on the back of a flat-bed and we don't have a lot of confidence in it.  I do hope the electricity company are making regular visits to re-fuel it.

The kids have been going up the wall. No TV. No Playstation. No computer games. No MSN.  Fortunately one of my guitars is an acoustic, but that was no consolation to the rest of the household. Quite the opposite in fact. Perhaps they will now regret having not developed a reading habit.  It has been no fun for us grown-ups either.  We have been concentrating on the elections and expected to have done some catching up of laundry and ironing after Thursday.

What has been most scary about the last few days is the reminder of how fragile our society is with its dependence on electricity. We take it so much for granted, but just about everything relies on it. Even the gas cooker needs mains for ignition – and using a lighter to get the oven or grill going is not something we want to try again!  The DECT phones didn't work, and we had to dig out an old normal corded phone to be able to get calls. Mobile phones were not much help as batteries were running low and no chance to re-charge.  The gas water heater needs electricity to work, and in any case it is an electric pump which sends the water up to the tank.

And another thing… water takes so much longer to boil in a saucepan than in a kettle and the tea just does not taste the same. It must be something to do with the pressure in the kettle. Doesn't it cause water to boil at a lower temperature or something?

Having the road filled with emergency vehicles, and then electricity company vans, and then cranes and generators is dead exciting for about 5 minutes, but the excitement soon wears off…  we intend to sort out an emergency box, with decent candles, a corded phone, and an old-fashioned whistling kettle so that if there is a next time we will be a bit more comfortable.